In the days of command prompts and 1.2 MB floppy disks, programs needed very little random access memory (RAM) to run because the main operating system's footprint was small. RAM at this time was very expensive and 4 MB of RAM was considered then to be a large amount of memory. However, as computers became more powerful, more than 4 MB of memory was found to be needed.
Eventually, a pseudo-RAM or ‘virtual memory’ was created, to make up for the finite amounts of RAM when running memory-intensive programs. When physical memory (RAM) is used up, excess data is sent to virtual memory storage. Later, if information stored in virtual memory storage is needed to run a program, this data is sent from virtual memory storage to RAM.
However, there exist many limitations to the current state of technology with respect to virtual memory. For example, the search and seek time for needed data stored in virtual memory remains high, thereby expending the user's time and money resources.